“Who told the gorilla that he couldn’t go to the ballet?”

“It’s often when the lines you really love are lost that you know the episode’s working. That one joke doesn’t matter anymore, because the reality of the scene and the relationships are funny.”

Great profile of Armando Iannucci (known most recently for his UK political comedy The Thick Of It) ahead of the launch of Veep, his new (US-based) political comedy for HBO starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Also contained in the piece are some interesting observations about comedy, not just from Iannucci but also from his writing partners Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche.

‘It’s the weird thing about comedy,’ Roche said. ‘It’s sort of like boxing. You’re constantly throwing punches, and you might have one really big punch that everyone remembers — the really funny moment — but you’re trying to soften them up the whole time: joke, joke, joke, joke.’

‘Whereas drama’s two people in a boxing ring just looking at each other,’ Iannucci said.

“I don’t know why any of these people are doing this. I don’t know what they want.”

There’s a weird thing where a lot of the best comedies, certainly in this country, seem to come from a place of coming up with really good clever set pieces and then finding a way to join them… conversely, it’s also where a lot of the worst comedies come from, because people come up with set pieces and then find this sort of artificial way of sellotaping them together.

In the second half of this episode of the What Are You Laughing At? podcast, UK sitcom script editor Andrew Ellard (The IT Crowd, Red Dwarf), regular guest James Cary and host Dave Cohen discuss, among other things, finding the middle ground between writing gags and set pieces and motivating characters in believable ways, and the value of writing for dramas and soaps as training for writing comedy.

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